Abstract:
The proposed expansion of the current exemption for text and data mining (“TDM”) is
straightforward. Digital humanities scholars are using the current exemption to generate new insights about our culture. But as they have gained experience with the exemption, they have encountered hurdles that impose significant and unnecessary limitations on the value that the exemption can provide to the public. Specifically, the lack of a provision for sharing corpora imposes major limitations on the knowledge that can be generated because different researchers, who could bring new questions to the material and employ new methods for answering those questions, are foreclosed from doing so unless they start anew. Petitioners have thus requested that the Copyright Office (the “Office”) allow digital humanities scholars to avoid the significant, redundant, and unnecessary expenditure of time and resources needed to re-circumvent, re-clean, and re-process data in a research corpus that has already been assembled for text and data mining research conducted under the exemption.2 That obstacle adversely affects both individual researchers and the discipline of digital humanities as a whole.
